Tim Bray on hooking MS and Sun kit together: It's best illustrated by example; let's suppose that some big auto manufacturer has a bunch of J2EE infrastructure doing purchasing scheduling, and has a BizTalk deployment doing messaging to foreign subsidiaries; and suppose they want to make the two of them start talking to each other.So the smart thing to do is for the car-company CIO to get in touch with his account managers at Microsoft and Sun and tell them to send in some really smart senior people to sit down and work out how to do it. Except for, until a week ago it was really hard for us to work together on this kind of a problem because both sides would want to check with their lawyers before saying anything about anything, and the lawyers (as is their job) would point out the risks, and as you can well imagine the customer would be severely unimpressed. If the nature of the environment is indeed talk to legal before answering your customers... well that's got to be frustrating. I don't know tho' - sometimes the thing to do is to think beyond the vendors and find some smart programmers instead. Speaking from experience in the scenario Tim offers- we've done exactly this at Propylon for our customers - integrating BizTalk and J2EE doesn't require the level of vendor coordination and focus that Tim is talking about....